Rabbit in the Moon

47 W. 8th St. (212-473-2800)

On an unpromising stretch of Eighth Street lined with shoe stores and smoke shops, there is an ancient baronial manse. Or, rather, there is a two-story storefront that someone has covered in chunky stone facing and plastic ivy in the hope of evoking a baronial manse. This is Rabbit in the Moon, the latest—and arguably the silliest—gastropub to come to the Village. Inside the entrance is a wall-mounted deer head adorned with a large string of pearls; this luckless beast comes to seem like a kind of presiding spirit, embodying the restaurant’s off-kilter attempt to both conjure tradition and tweak it. There are armchairs and big fireplaces, shelves of Waverley novels, clumsily reproduced paintings of Shakespeare, Byron, and Wordsworth. The menu has fish-and-chips, bangers-and-mash, a Pimm’s cocktail fancied up with kumquats, and something called a “Lady Diana negroni.” It’s as if someone who’d never been in a pub had tried to construct one after looking up “pub” on Wikipedia. This may not be as unlikely as it sounds: stencilled on the ceiling of the upstairs bar is a long text—“The inhabitants of the U.K. have been drinking beer since the Bronze Age . . .”—that really does come from the Wikipedia entry for “pub.”

The laziness and the cynicism on display here typify what is making the Village an increasingly terrible place to get dinner. There’s the reluctance to seat you while tables sit empty for hours at a time; the sense that the restaurant considers itself a “destination” (visitors have included Oliver Stone and Janet Jackson); and the continual tension between what the place pretends to be and what it is. Recently, a barman making a so-called 8th Street Smash (Maker’s Mark, brandied cherries, orgeat, bitters) didn’t even bother to hide the fact that he was substituting a lowlier whiskey from the rail. The switch betrays two annoying assumptions: that you truly care about name-brand spirits and that you won’t notice what you’re drinking.

Randomly enough, the cooking’s not bad. The fish-and-chips improves on its greasy namesake, with a light beer batter surrounding silky cod, and fries sprinkled with roasted thyme; the rib eye is decent. And very fresh, pliant gnocchi come in a dauntingly rich sauce of artichoke, pine nuts, and parsley. Desserts sound unexciting but are imaginatively executed. A panna cotta is covered by a thin lemony film and has shards of sugar glass scattered over the top; around it tiny basil leaves sit in small puddles of eggy foam. For some reason, the dessert menu bears the coat of arms of King George II. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for dinner. Entrées $17-$34.) ♦